Historiography
Historiography is the study of the creation of historical narratives through sources and methods that creators of those narratives, historians, use to construct such narratives. A historiographer is concerned with understanding not only the private motivations of individual actors, but the social context in which they produced their histories, the material foundation as well as the ideological "superstructure" built upon it; from the work for day-to-day existence, to rights of kings, biships, dukes, and other nobles as compared to those of their subjects, to religion and God; constructing theories to explain how they came about. Since historiographers are concerned with the historical past, they operate at some remove from the events they seek to understand, and must therefore often examine those narratives themselves for clues, treating them as sources of evidence. Primary sources are obtained from contemporaneous experience (such as a newspaper article or an eyewitness account) or from later documentation by knowledgeable persons (such as a memoir); primary sources provide historiographers with the building-blocks of theories. Historiographers then interpret the evidence that these sources provide them; such interpretations, which can take the form of journal articles, books on history, or encyclopedia articles, among other things, are secondary sources, and can help interpret the significance and relevance of the source material. Most of the work of the historiographer is conjectural and interpretative, and thus nothing can be taken absolutely for granted, because new evidence may be discovered which will turn the prevailing historiographical consensus on its head. Imperiurm Romanorum is informed by the historiography of what is popularly known as the Holy Roman Empire; in fact it did not come to be called this until well after the period with which the game is concerned. For the sake of convenience, the term "Neo-Roman Empire" will be used to refer to the areas controlled by nobles who swore fealty to the monarchy that grew out of the post-Carolingian east Frankish Kingdom; the King of the Romans. The purpose of this work, then, is to help the players roleplay their characters; it is a sourcebook for a game. Some parts of the past will be emphasized more than others; this is especially true of the conflict between the great houses, around which the game revolves. However, an attempt will be made to give a sketch of the history leading up to the period in which the game is set, to trace the historical development of the institutions of nobility, monarchy, feudalism, manorialism, the church, etc. The pre-history of medieval Europe In order to be comprehensible, the development of sub-Roman Europe must be traced back to the Roman Empire and its encounter with Germanic "barbarians" beginning in the 1st Century BC. Although a detailed history of the Roman era is outside the scope of this game, some knowledge of the relations between the Romans and the peoples that would later come to dominate the territory of the Western Empire and their interactions is necessary, since it is from Roman sources and in Roman terms that we understand the pre-history of the Middle Ages. The word Germany itself is a transliteration of the Latin Germania, referring to the area inhabited by peoples speaking a continuum of related languages, itself derived from a Gallic word thought to mean "neighbor," first encountered in Caesar's writings. The Romans encountered the Germans during their conquest of Gaul, and understood that they represented a number of different peoples. Our sources, primarily Caesar's De Bello Gallico (Gallic War) and Tacitus' Germania describe numerous tribal confederations, providing some of the vocabulary by which various European peoples refer to the Germans and Germany, notably Alemans. These names also provide a basis for mythologized reconstructions of the ethnogenesis of various Germanic peoples including the Swedes (Suebi). Roman Period As mentioned above, the first recorded contact between the Romans and what are believed to have been Germanic peoples occurred during the Roman conquest of Gaul in 56 BC. The Roman frontier along the Rhine fluctuated somewhat over the course of roughly the next half-century, stabilizing in AD 17 when Tiberius recalled Germanicus Julius Caesar, who had been leading punitive expeditions against the Germans in revenge for the massacre of three legions and the Roman governor Publius Quinctilius Varus at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest seven years previous. Various Germanic tribal confederations evolved over the intervening centuries. We hear, for example, of Saxons, but it's not known if these are the same Saxons as the ones that conquered Britain. By the time the Western Roman Empire began to fall apart in the 5th century, contact between Germanic tribes and Rome had resulted in a significant degree of assimilation. Indeed, the Roman Army came to largely consist of German federati